In article ,
SMS wrote:

D. Peter Maus wrote:

First, there is only a 100 share in any market. New listeners are not
printed up like $100 bills in Washington. They have to be taken from
some pre-existing program source.

It's coming from
listeners that would otherwise be listening to their iPod, CDs, or
digital media (in the car or not in the car) because there's nothing on
analog AM or FM that they want to listen to. HD radio is much more
likely to be stealing customers from satellite radio than from analog FM.

If "killer programming" is going to be available on HD, why not put it
on analog FM now? Stations are languishing trying to gain market share
because no one wants to listen to them. Why? Because they're not doing
anything worth listening to. You don't need HD to put decent programming
on the air!

Any new programming outlet steals it's
listeners from the existing 100 share. So, literally, stations are
hoping to steal their own listeners to put them on the HD streams.

Not true at all.

Actually, most veterans of this industry agree that is the case.

So, what HD is really doing is robbing the analog channels of it's
revenues while putting the ratings points on HD streams that can't begin
to replace the lost revenue from the baseband.

You're not looking at the big picture.

I hate to tell you this, but that IS the big picture. Boiled down to
residue, what we have here is some looney theory that broadcasters who
can't lure listeners to a single channel will be able to lure listeners
to many channels. What magic programming is going to cause this to
happen? If such magical programming exists, why aren't they using it NOW?

How the hell the bean counters at these stations let that go is beyond
me.

It's because they have more information than you have.

No, actually it is because too many stations are more governed by
emotion rather than sound business sense. I give the recent failure of
KGNY as a prime example.

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John Higdon
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